from… all our names are kin

from… all our names are kin: a field guild to future flora

wet innards       hold all of         kin’s secrets: a sweetness of the rot      call kin      a flavor saver;[1]     call kin      a map to an imagined country;        call kin         boldly benign and lovely toxic.     call genes       that propel the biting gnat  and prolong the shelf life.    call kin    a PG message in a bottle. call kin       a preview       to a commercial extinction,      a soft firming.      call kin      a first fruit      and happy endling.

a plant which is fixed in the ground does not like to be separated from it.[2] but these days kin recall a primal past to wander, wonder. a tree that moves is a ghost to the earth. a tree is a lung a tree is like a lung walking in a forest. adventurous roots shoot from the soil, fine particles attached to thin hairs. restlessness is a mild protest…at their otherwise fixed position.[3] the bark of the birch is a tenacious engine for walking, feeling machines for moss and lichen, which color the stones.[4] refusing kin’s stasis is desire for worlds, rejections of imagined enclos- ures of gender. so kin walk, great strides,
inch by inch, protesting pavements and roads, that bend from the roots and fixed bodies. the laughing weeds watch from old stormwater gutters. kinselves,
kind kin giddy with amusement.

notes

[1] G. Bruening and J. Lyons, “The Case of the Flavr Savr Tomato,” California Agriculture 54, no. 4 (2000): 6–7.

[2] Nicolaus of Damascus, De Plantis, translated by E.S. Forster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 14.

[3] Norman Taylor, Botany: The Science of Plant Life (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1922), np. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/49211/pg49211-images.html#page_076.

[4] Jane Loudon, Botany For Ladies: or, A Popular Introduction to the Natural System of Plants, According to the Classification of De Candolle (London: John Murray: 1842), xiii.

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